Law of Wiki Expansion

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Any specialised wiki, as it continues to grow, will tend to accumulate general, more encyclopedic, information.

For every wiki out there that exists by The Wiki Rule there is the issue of some additional knowledge not exactly under the main mission of the site still being very useful for understanding the behaviour of the site's focus. There's also the fact that the internet exists globally while a wiki's contributors can exhibit local variations in behaviour and these often have to be explained.

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For example, our Useful Notes pages exist to help people understand things that may be taken for granted under the Creator Provincialism of other contributors or of TV writers. It started with issues of geography and then extended to subjects that have a complex relationship with their portrayal in media. Things which it is useful to know in order to understand everything that is written hence Useful Notes. Even before this, we also have pages on production trivia and audience reactions, which are not in fact tropes by themselves but which still impact on how stories are written such as Executive Meddling and the Fandom tropes.

This effect dates back to the original wiki, Ward Cunningham's Wiki Wiki Web. There were enough Separated by a Common Language problems that users felt the need to create a page explaining "American Cultural Assumptions"... which turned out to be similar to our Useful Notes pages.

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Examples:

Halopedia, the Halo wiki, has a page on corn, as well as other things, due to it being an inclusive wiki.

The Transformers Wiki has a lot of information on toy production and technology. The Transformers Wiki also has pages for Jesus (probably existing to service the comparisons between Optimus Prime and Him) and Michael Jackson. Hilariously, it pointedly does not include any information that does not show up directly in Transformers-related media, even if it would be relevant general knowledge otherwise.

Wookiepedia, the Star Wars wiki, includes pages on gender and death, among other things. It even an article on breasts, which has caused quite a bit of problems when outside forces came to the site's community complaining about it.

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